Yesterday, iXsystems upload a snapshot of their new FreeNAS release on the SVN. The new FreeNAS is based on nanoBSD, then here are all the steps for generate the disk image of this release (from a FreeBSD 8.1 amd64).Refer to the README file for more information.

The resulted disk image will be found in:/tmp/YOUR-LOGIN/obj.freenas64|32/_.disk.full

(Don’t forget to copy the disk image in other place and before a reboot if you have the ‘clear_tmp_enable=”YES”‘ in you rc.conf!)Cross-compilation of a 32bit release should be possible, but didn’t works for the moment (stop during compile of ports/net/unison).

The generated image can only boot from the first IDE device (/dev/ad0s1a) because of original nanoBSD script limitation (removed in BSDRP).

If you would test it from an USB key, first step is to copy it on your key (/dev/da0 for this example):

dd if=_.disk.full of=/dev/da0 bs=128k

And we need to adapt it, first by setting glabel on each partitions:

glabel label cfg /dev/da0s3

glabel label data /dev/da0s4

glabel label freenas /dev/da0s1a

Then mount the root filesystem of the FreeNAS:

mount /dev/label/freenas /mnt

And add this line to boot/loader.conf (it’s a FreeBSD 8.1 boot from usb Â«featureÂ»):kern.cam.boot_delay=10000

Now you can try to boot from your usb key (login: root, no password).FreeNAS is configured as DHCP client, you can try to connect to the very experimental WebGUI, but as wrote in the readme, this first snapshot is only a testing of the Â«baseÂ» system.